After Amy: How the death of our daughter changed our lives

When their daughter died, Roger Rosenblatt and his wife drove five hours to stay with their son-in-law and grandchildren – and never left. He describes how family life, the second time around, helped them overcome their grief

I wake up earlier than the other members of our household, usually around 5am, to perform the one duty I have mastered. After writing the Word for the Morning on a yellow Post-it on the kitchen table, emptying the dishwasher, setting the table for the children's breakfasts, I prepare toast. I take out the butter to allow it to soften, and put three slices in the toaster. Bubbies and I like plain buttered toast. Bubbies (James) is 20 months and the youngest of our daughter Amy's three children. Sammy, who is five, prefers it with cinnamon, with the crusts cut off. Jessie, aged seven, eats cereal. When the bell rings, I shift the slices from the toaster to plates, and butter them.

My son-in-law, Harris, usually spends half the night in Bubbies's little bed. When I go upstairs, around 6am, Bubbies hesitates, but I give him a knowing look and he opens his arms to me. "Toast?" he says. I take him from his father, change him, and carry him downstairs to allow Harris another 20 minutes' sleep.

Later, I take Jessie to the bus stop. On a damp, grey morning we stand together at the corner of our street. One by one, down the hill come the mothers, their kids running beside them. The scene passes for pleasant and ordinary, unless one notes the odd presence of the lone grandfather.

This has been our routine since Amy died, on 8 December 2007, at 2:30pm. The day of her death, my wife Ginny and I drove the five hours from our home on Long Island to Bethesda, Maryland, where Amy and Harris lived. With Harris's encouragement, we have been there ever since. "How long are you staying?" Jessie asked the next morning. "Forever," I said.

Amy Elizabeth Rosenblatt Solomon, 38 years old, paediatrician, wife of hand surgeon Harrison Solomon and mother of three, collapsed on her treadmill at home. "Jessie and Sammy discovered her," our oldest son, Carl, told us on the phone. Jessie had run upstairs to Harris. "Mummy isn't talking," she said. Harris got to Amy within seconds, and tried CPR, but her heart had stopped and she could not be revived.

Amy's was ruled a "sudden death due to an anomalous right coronary artery" – meaning her two coronary arteries fed her heart from the same side. Normally, the arteries are located on both sides of the heart, so that if one fails, the other can do the work. In Amy's heart, they ran alongside each other. They could have been squeezed between the aorta and the pulmonary artery, which can expand during physical exercise. The blood flow was cut off. Her condition, affecting less than two thousandths of 1% of the population, was asymptomatic; she might have died at any time in her life.

After she died, my wife Ginny and I moved from our five-bedroom house to a bedroom with a connected bath – the in-law apartment we used to occupy whenever we visited. We put in a dresser and a desk, and Harris added a TV and a rug. It may have appeared that we were reducing our comforts, but the older one gets, the less space one needs, and the less one wants.

Ligaya, Bubbies' nanny, altered her schedule to be with us 12 hours a day, five days a week. Ligaya is a small, lithe woman in her early 50s. No one outside the family could have felt Amy's death more acutely. Yet what she said to Harris, and to the rest of us, was dispassionate, and of immeasurable use: "You are not the first to go through such a thing, and you are better able to handle it than most."

To begin with, Bubbies looks around for Amy, says, "Mama", when he sees her pictures, and clings to his father. Bubbies has blond hair and a face usually occupied by observant silences. When I am alone with him, he plays happily enough. I've taught him to give a high five, and when he does, I stagger across the room to show him how strong he is. When Harris enters the kitchen, Bubbies drops everything, runs to him, and holds him tight at the knees.

Jessie is tall, also blond. Amy used to say she was the most optimistic person she'd ever known. She is excited about her hip-hop dance class; about a concert her school is giving in Amy's name, to raise money for a memorial scholarship; about going to the Nutcracker. "Do your Nutcracker dance, Boppo," Jessie says. (Ginny is Mimi, I am Boppo.) I swing into my improvised ballet, the high point of which is when I wiggle my ass like the dancing mice.

Sammy is tall, too, with dark hair. He brings me a book to read, which just happened to be in the house, called Lifetimes: The Beautiful Way To Explain Death To Children. The book says, "There's a beginning and an end for everything that is alive. In between is living." I lean back on the couch with Sammy tucked in the crook of my arm, and read to him about the beauty of death.

We begin to fit in to Amy's and Harris's house. We knew the house only as visiting family, having stayed for a few days at a time, perhaps a week. Now it is ours without belonging to us, familiar and strange. We learn where the tools, the extension cords, the Scotch tape and the light bulbs are kept. We note the different dresser drawers for the children's clothing, the location of favoured books and games.

Before, whenever Ginny and I drove down, we phoned Amy from the car when we were a few minutes away. She would stand framed by the dark-red doorway, holding a child or two. Everyone smiled.

Amy practised medicine only two days a week, to be with the children. Her household was like her – full of play, but careful. In the storage area downstairs, there was always a surplus of bandages, paper napkins, cups and Kleenex, as well as batteries of every size. To this day, we have not run out of aspirin.

Harris's stoicism is undemonstrative. A strong man, built wide and powerful, he easily carries all three children at once in his arms up the stairs. He performs surgery two days a week and heads orthopaedics at the hospital. At home, his few remaining hours are devoted to working out the children's schedules with Ginny and Ligaya, and playing games and watching TV with the kids. He bathes them and tucks them in.

On the day Amy died, he had sat beside her body in the hospital – an hour, maybe more. Now, he rarely speaks about his feelings. He and I talk about sports and politics, and the children. Ginny tells me that when I am away, and she and Harris sit down to their late dinner in the kitchen, her heart breaks for him. "This should be his wife sitting across the table," she says.

He says he doubts that he'll remarry. Self-sufficient, he tends to be a world within himself. He fixes things like lamps and toilets. He sews. He solves problems with electrical wires and fuses. He makes the hands of others work again. And he has done everything one can do in his situation – encouraging the children to talk about Amy whenever they feel like it, and not to hold back tears.

Whenever necessary, he and the children visit a psychotherapist who specialises in grief counselling. He keeps in close contact with Jessie's and Sammy's teachers. But he also deserves a life.

He embraces the demands put upon him with a gusto that dispenses cheer, and in the lulls we try to keep one another afloat. One night in February, Jessie and Sammy had a meltdown as they were going to bed. Ginny and I sat in the living room, listening to Harris's steady voice in the intermissions of the children's wailing. Eventually, they were quieted. He came downstairs and sat staring vacantly at his laptop. "Look," I said, going over to him, "we're never going to get over this. That's a given. But the children will be all right. I promise you. I've seen it elsewhere."

"I'm a scientist," he said. "It's hard for me to deal with things that aren't facts."

Ginny handles most of the essentials. She lays out the children's outfits for the day, supervises the brushing of teeth, plaits Jessie's hair, and checks the backpacks. There is hardly a moment when she is not on call. Harris gave her Amy's mobile phone, for which Ginny recorded her own greeting.

I do odd jobs, such as driving the kids to appointments and food shopping. Occasionally I contribute an idea, such as the word for the morning, which I instituted shortly after Amy died. Usually I make a game of the word, asking Jessie and Sammy to find other words in it, or I include a drawing. I try to hit upon a word that is a stretch for Sammy but not too easy for Jessie.

I do puzzle books with Jessie, and Sammy peppers me with questions about animals and the stars and planets. I am often confounded by things I'd forgotten about children, for example that they have no respect for sequential thought. Responding to one of their relentless questions, I will go as deep as I can into an explanation of, say, a solar eclipse. Sammy will ask, "What's the biggest number in the world?" At the same time, Jessie will ask, "How tall will I be, Boppo?" Then, Sammy: "Do marlins have lips?"

Bubbies has been attending to his own education, proceeding from one word, to several, to two-word sentences, to three and more. Some say that children learn to speak in order to tell the stories already in them. An early word of his was "back". He wanted reassurance that when any of us left the house, or even a room, we were coming back.

Our bedroom doubles as a gallery for family photographs. Once in a while, Ginny is brought down by the sight of them. I am more often felled by mundane problems or momentary concerns, such as choosing a shirt to wear or remembering to take a pill – since nothing will ever be normal again.

There are things I don't want to know and things Ginny doesn't want to know. The doctors we consulted after Amy's death differed just enough in their speculations to leave room for anguish. Ginny wants to pursue the question to get to a more definite answer. I have hesitated.

I do not wish to hear how extraordinarily rare Amy's condition was, and how even rarer it is that someone dies from it. One cardiologist I spoke with early on said flat out that however unlikely it is that someone was born with Amy's heart structure, the anomaly is almost never lethal. To find out, definitively, that Amy's death was one in a million or a trillion would only deepen my anger.

Before Amy died, the big decision of our day was where to have lunch. "Our friends live by choice," Ginny says. "What choice do I have?"

"I think my whole life has led up to this moment," she tells me. "When Carl was born, I felt I was coming into my own, to be a mother. It's what I love to do. I know who I am." Her motherly decisions are without premeditation, like an athlete's. When Bubbies starts school, she will take him every day, and not relegate that duty to Ligaya, because she knows that she will be as close to a mother as Bubbies, Jessie and Sammy will have from now on. "I am leading Amy's life," she says in despair yet comfort, too.

Bubbies warms to me. Among the adults of the household I stand a distant fourth in his affections to Harris, Ginny and Ligaya, and he continues to regard me, accurately, as an amateur entertainer. Yet little by little he has detected that I have certain practical uses, in addition to toast-making, and as long as I keep my place, and perform the few duties of which I am capable, everything is OK.

Throughout the first winter and the spring, there is hardly a moment for anything but play, caretaking, schooling, chauffeuring and, by 9pm, sleep. But I am grateful for the children's crammed schedules. Between December and June, Sammy and Jessie had birthdays, advancing to five and seven, and Bubbies went from 14 months to 20. His transformation seemed like one of those time-lapse tricks in movies.

In April, we celebrated Amy's birthday. When we blew out the candles, Harris asked Sammy what he thought Mummy would wish for. "To be alive," Sammy said.

Bubbies begins preschool. Ginny takes him. He cries on his first day, and is fine after that. Jessie starts a new school year, Sammy nursery.

On the weekend, we visit the cemetery. Each time, I go with a mixture of need and trepidation, because I know I may break down at the sight of the small rectangle of earth, the boxwood outlining it, the conical brass receptacle for flowers and the marker, which is so definite.

Jessie has brought white carnations; Sammy, a balloon, which he plans to release into the air. He seems fragile these days – drifting into faraway stares and silences. Yet he talks more about Amy's death. Yesterday morning, he asked me again how Mummy died. "The heart stopped. Right?" he said. His first day of nursery, when the children were asked to draw pictures of their families, Sammy's drawing included Amy lying dead on the floor.

Jessie places the carnations in the conical vessel. Harris writes, "We love you, Mummy" on the balloon. The children let it go. It flies up in the heavy air and snags on a distant tree. We assure the children that the wind will free it eventually.

In November I am away and Ginny calls on my mobile as I pull into the post office parking lot. She tells me that last night Bubbies (or James, as Harris has taken to calling him, now he is in school) cried in Harris's arms. "Mummy," he said, as if calling her. "When is Mummy coming home?" He has never said such a thing.

He was just starting to talk when Amy died. All this time, has he been thinking she was simply away? Ginny says Harris told him Mummy is dead and is not coming home, and in the morning James seemed fine. Immediately after we hang up, a friend calls. He asks where I am. I tell him I have to look around to be sure. He thinks I'm joking.

Christmas passes easier than it did last year. Besides the Caterpillar dump truck James received, and the gas station, and the workbench, and the garage, he got his own toy toaster – "To make toast like you, Boppo," he said.

We proceed into the new year, like any family, marking on a wall in the playroom how many inches the children have grown. Jessie hardly ever plays the drama queen these days. She no longer confuses disappointment with catastrophe, and she looks out for her brothers.

Sammy reads very well and shows a near-scholarly appreciation of things learned. Long ago, I abandoned all hope that I would ever learn anything new again – too few remaining brain cells. Now, thanks to the reading I do with him before bedtime, I teem with information about trucks, boats, planes, cranes and drilling equipment.

James is a little boy now. Most of the babyness is going fast. I miss it. He requests (and is granted) his own Word for the Morning. He used to have his breakfast toast cut in small squares. Now he wants "real toast" – two halves.

Harris has signed up for golf lessons. Since, as he knows, I do not regard golf as a sport, I pretend to be bored by his decision. But it greatly pleases Ginny and me to see him doing something for himself. He has also taken up snowboarding. Once in a while, he has a late-night beer with friends. Early on, he used to grab dinners on the run, as he bathed the kids and got them ready for bed. Now he, Ginny and I usually dine at the kitchen table like civilised adults, while Sammy and Jessie take showers.

From time to time, Ginny and I wonder whether we ought to ask Harris if he still wants us to stay. We very much want to, and are fairly sure he'll say yes. But we shy away from asking because we don't want him to take the slightest impression that we want out. This is our life.

I know we are creating a diversion for the children as well as a differently constructed life for them. Yet we are doing the same thing for ourselves. When Amy died, Ginny and I never had to confer as to where we wanted to be and should be. We had to ask Harris, but not each other. Now, ought we to ask him again? We decide that he will tell us when he wants us to go. And until then, my original answer to Jessie of "forever" stands. If a new woman should enter Harris's life, as we hope will eventually happen, we know he will choose well. When that occurs, we won't have to ask then either.

• Extracted from Making Toast: A Family Story, by Roger Rosenblatt, to be published by Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd on 23 September, at £12.99. To order a copy for £8.99, with free UK p&p, visit the Guardian Bookshop, or call 0330 333 6846.